The Third. Covid liberalism. Almaz Braev

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      In Russia, the middle class was insignificant. At the time of crisis, armed workers and sailors (peasants in disguise) entered into a fateful dialogue not with doctors and teachers but with the nobility. Did they have no one to tell about the Russian state? And what state, one of the tsar and the priests? The discussion revolved around the public, not the state. There was no state anymore. It had all been self-deception.

      CHAPTER X

      ARE THERE LEVELS TO TOTALITARIANISM

      How many industrial generations was Germany ahead of Russia?

      From the so-called average, we can infer the population’s self-reflection level. Which level was it – zeref, zeremid, or remid?

      The remid level, as we have found out, gives the informal elite of civilization a chance to stay alive.

      After all, Germany still was a country of tradition, something that all nations feel as a phantom pining for the past. This manifested itself most clearly in Italian fascism. But the Italian fascists didn’tannihilate the local socialists until 1920. Russia was close in all ways to agrarian Italy. For that reason, in 1919—1920 the Italian socialists seized factories in the industrially developed central and northern Italy, following the example of Russia’s proletariat. Italy was a country of active anarchism, meaning it didn’t need the state.

      With that said, Italians had spent 300 years fighting to free their homeland and unify it into a single state. The state meant ownership; the state scale, remids. Italy’s statism took the form of fascism. In

      two years, all socialists, advocates of a socialist community, were killed off (with some help from the residents). That left the upper bourgeoisie, factory owners, and latifundistas pleased. The local administration sided with the fascists. In Russia, the proletariat and the peasantry followed Lenin, not Savinkov; in Italy, the former socialist Mussolini (precisely because of the Risorgimento). The Italians wanted order: they had suffered for centuries because of the lack of a single state.

      The Witch-Hunt

      In the Middle Ages the Inquisition hunted down witches. This kind of hunting – searching for scapegoats – is something typical of all times. Someone must be called to account for epidemics, disasters, crop failures: the practice of declaring the innocent guilty has existed since ancient times.

      The Inquisition chose not to reinvent the wheel. Women didn’t love women. So what reason was there for the Inquisition to love women, even the most beautiful of them? After all, when some kind of misfortune happened in a village or even across a whole city, it was all because some woman had evoked evil spirits. This is the zeref level. It doesn’t rely on facts or need evidence. The zeref level is

      one of conjectures and black thoughts, of loathing and envy.

      The zeremid level is one of wider practice. This kind of hunting involves someone specific and even logic, going from the specific to the general. Even though the specific here borrows a lot from the subconscious. But the zeremids name the perpetrator’s name. They even have the temerity to call the ruler the culprit, even though they do so at the instigation of liberal refags and, often, other revolutionaries. The thing is that traditional practice has several idols – ideals it lives with as people grow old and die. When saints’ names are secularized, people, it seems, no longer have a reason to

      live. But if people – soldiers, for example – don’t want to die for their king or fatherland – this level is that of zeremids. Zeremids have primitive designs. They invariably want to stay alive. That wasprecisely why the Bolsheviks lay the blame for their troubles on soldiers going to their deaths and on

      the tsar and his henchmen. The tsar wasn’t a witch – he was the people’s saint, the God’s Anointed.

      But they lay the blame on him all the same. This qualifies as the zeremid level, with the entire ethnos

      declared guilty. This fits right in the middle of the dark tribal subconscious, which looks for the enemy

      without, as in primitive times, while the enemy is actually within. Cunning? Cunning. Antisemitism

      can attain a remid scale. But it is second-generation zeremids and remids that bring it to that level.

      CHAPTER XI

      THE OUROBOROS

      You might have heard of the ancient symbol depicting a serpent eating its own tail. It’s called the ouroboros. It is held to symbolize eternity, the cyclic renewal of life. The rapid change of the state elite leads to the demise of the people.

      «Between 1933 and 1935 most of the czarist engineers were rounded up. There were large-scaletransfers of people to different provinces, so they could not communicate with each other. Many innocents were executed immediately; others were banished to Siberia.»

      «By the spring of 1936, almost all the young people who had received secondary or higher technical education between 1927 and 1932 had been rounded up. Thus, the regime first created a whole class

      of specialists, and then, seeing in it a threat to its power, destroyed it. Before getting rid of the qualified technical elite, the party and the government prepared successors to take that elite’s place.

      If they hadn’t, industrial development would have faced a dead end.»

      «On graduating from the academy after two years of studies, the wunderkinds (as the old workers at our factory called them) were appointed to managerial positions as soon as the specialists who had

      occupied them disappeared. This clearly planned and thought-out policy was carried out openly and rigorously for several years. That solved the problem – creating a class of «devotees to the party, truly

      Soviet specialists’ (in the parlance of the slogans of that time). But the young managers lacked both experience operating machinery and theoretical knowledge, which two years at the academy could not provide. СКАЧАТЬ